9

“I won’t let you get away like this.”

His eyes fluttered open to look at Miss Parker who stood next to his bed in her pyjamas. The shadows on her face, caused by the semi-darkness in the room, accentuated her features and grim expression. It sent Jarod’s stomach churning. What did she mean? Was she going to return him to the Centre, now that she was angry with him? Or was she...?

His question was undoubtedly answered, when she pulled the covers away from him and straddled him. He looked up at her, unable to recall the voice of reason inside his head when she came down to kiss him on the lips. He flipped them over and was on top of her now, unbuttoning her top as if his life depended on it. Her warm moving body beneath him made him crazy...

“Jarod!” she moaned. Then louder and somewhat annoyed: “Jarod!”

He was awake with a start and found himself sitting up in bed and staring at Miss Parker who stood in pretty much the same spot that she had occupied in his dream. But instead of tousled hair and pyjamas she sported suit trousers and a burgundy blouse. Her hair was still tousled and slightly damp from her shower and her face was bare of all make-up. It was that fact and the worried look in her eyes that made Jarod jump to alert-mode.

“What’s up?” he asked, feeling himself getting frenzied.

“It’s about Amanda,” Miss Parker said, her earlier distance towards him not yet forgotten but pushed into the background for now. “The hospital just called my cell-phone. She’s gone.”

“What do you mean... she’s gone?” he asked, running one hand through his hair, confused.

“I don’t know!” she hissed at him. “Now quit standing there and get dressed! We need to find her!”

From the corner of his eye he watched Miss Parker pace restlessly. Her image disappeared when he hurriedly pulled his sweater over his head. When it appeared again, she had pressed her fingertips against her temples.

“Do they know whether she walked away on her own?”

“You saw her!” Miss Parker dropped her hands from her forehead, then raised them again in an exasperated gesture. “She was weak and frightened. Why would she leave the hospital?”

“Did they tell you anything else?” he asked.

Miss Parker shook her head. “No. They just told me to come because she’d vanished.”

Only now he noticed just how worried Miss Parker looked. She had really made a connection to the girl in the few days that they had spent together.

Consciously putting their earlier situation behind him, he stepped towards her and touched her shoulder lightly. For the first time that he could remember, she didn’t flinch, but her gaze flew up to his quickly. The quizzical look in her eyes nearly made him break his earlier resolve to stay away from her, but then he remembered what was much more important right now.

“We’ll find her,” he said, then, following an impulse, pulled her into him.

Miss Parker inhaled Jarod’s scent and found herself dizzy with a familiar feeling. She stepped back quickly from his embrace, looked into his eyes and found herself hurrying towards the door.

“We need to get going!” she said, still shaky from their previous encounter.

Nurse Helen swirled around when she heard approaching footsteps. Her heart was racing and panic was tugging at the edges of her nerves although the matter was no longer in her hands. None of the other hospital staff had laid any blame on her, but she still felt bad about this thing happening on her shift. She had been doing night-shifts for ages, but nothing had ever gone wrong. Well, not like this anyway.

She took in the appearance of what she presumed where Amanda’s parents. Both were tall and attractive and just as dark-haired as Amanda. The woman, who was walking slightly ahead of the man was wearing business attire and her gaze was dark. She looked as if she was used to intimidating people. Maybe she was a lawyer or a cop. Still, it was obvious from the grimness of her stance, that this was very personal to her.

The man was more obviously worried. He had kind dark eyes where hers were rather cold and he seemed to have be rather used to trying to soothe his wife.

“What happened?” the woman inquired. She possessed a sort of violent kind of beauty that manifested itself in full, arrogantly pursed lips and shiny black hair that swung elegantly whenever she turned her head.

She raised one eyebrow when Helen failed to answer right away. The man caught her shoulders before she could reach out to shake the nurse. Helen didn’t blame her. She was a mother herself and she knew just how great maternal concern could be.

“I... I was on my patrol through the corridors. Another little girl was crying... there was this noise and when I returned the window was smashed and Amanda was gone.”

The woman’s eyes widened, then she pushed past Helen into Amanda’s now empty room.

The cold wind blew into Miss Parker’s face when she entered the room and her heart contracted at the sight of the empty bed. The window, indeed, was smashed, but there was nothing that it might have been smashed with inside the room. She crossed the room and tried to gaze out of the window. There was a dark object, looking like a big stone just outside on the pavement where some cops were already gathering.

Had the thrown stones inside the house and in the aquarium been warning that she had chosen to ignore? Was it her fault that Amanda had been taken? Had there been a danger she had failed to sense?

Miss Parker covered her face with her hand and tried to breathe, but found herself unable to. Another stabbing pain cut through the left side of her chest and she could barely prevent herself from grabbing the window to stay upright.

“Ma’am? I’m so very sorry. This person who has taken your daughter can’t be far! The police will find them...” she heard the nurse’s voice coming from far away.

“She’s not my daughter...” she murmured, slowly regaining her senses, then straightened up quickly. “It’s your fault she was taken! Why didn’t you take care of her?”

Her voice had risen quickly and she found herself so angry that she nearly started shaking the woman in front of her.

“Hey...” Jarod’s soft tone of voice that was meant to soothe, only upset her more.

“Is there anything we failed to see?” she asked him, desperate for him to, as usual, be one step ahead of her. As much as she usually hated it, she was now longing for him to know more than she did, but the sad look in his eyes told her, that he was just as helpless as she was.

“The cops are looking for her,” he told her in a low voice. “They’ll find her.”

The look in her eyes was unexpectedly cold when she swung round to face him again: “What makes you so sure?”

Miss Parker found it increasingly annoying to maintain her German accent and occasional fake difficulty with grammar and vocabulary while they sat huddled round the wooden table in the children’s home’s cosy kitchen.

Angela sat next to her and Jarod, wearing a knitted sweater and jeans that, along with her short disheveled hair, gave her a somewhat creased attractiveness. Miss Parker noticed only that the older woman must have once been a heavy smoker because her voice possessed the deep, raspy quality that was almost always caused by a few too many cigarettes.

“I suppose we should have a drink!” Angela said firmly and walked over to a cupboard above the sink that was too high to be reached by children and retrieved three glasses and a bottle of scotch. Miss Parker decided that the woman was definitely to her liking.

Angela poured them each a generous amount and then downed half of hers without even cringing at the bitter taste.

“Good one,” Miss Parker murmured monosyllabically, savoring the taste. Her time with Jarod, she noticed, had put a stop to her nightly alcohol escapades. Right now she deemed that to be negative rather than positive.

They sat in silence for a moment, then Angela spoke.

“You know... this is not how we usually handle crises around here,” she said, motioning towards the scotch bottle. “It’s just that I can’t stand how that poor little girl has to suffer again.”

Miss Parker reacted with silence, wondering whether anyone had ever said that about her. Maybe when her mother had died, or when she had been shipped off to boarding-school, crying in the Sweeper-driven car all the way to the airport. Or when she had returned and found herself chained to the Centre.

“It was such a drama when her mother died. It was all about the papers. The shooting, the fact that she had to witness it all... nobody really knew why her father killed her mother. They didn’t get along well after the divorce, but there had never been any kind of violence...”

Angela trailed off and took another sip of her scotch. Noticing that Parker had already finished hers, she leaned over to give her a refill. An action that was regarded with some concern by Jarod who knew how likely Miss Parker was to drink her sorrows away.

“She has improved lately,” Angela said. “I am amazed, really, and after 35 years in the business there isn’t much that can still amaze me, Susanne. You’ve only been working with her for a couple of days and she had already shown signs of improvement.”

Jarod watched Miss Parker’s seemingly expressionless face. One might believe that she was very good at hiding feelings, but her eyes always gave her away.

She probably knew, because in crucial moments like now she shielded them.

“She hasn’t been down here on her own accord at all since she has been here, but she stood in the doorway after that first evening. She didn’t stay when I offered her to, but it was still a small miracle.”

Parker bit her lip, then looked up at Angela.

“Do you have any idea who might have taken her?” Her voice wavered along with her accent.

“I don’t. The only person I would have suspected is in jail for her mother’s murder.”

Parker readily accepted yet another refill that Jarod hadn’t seen coming because he hadn’t noticed that Parker had drained the contents of her glass once again.

He would have been dead drunk after three generous glasses of scotch, but she was still holding up. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of a slur in her voice. Miss Parker could really hold her liquor, which was a sure sign that she drank too much of it.

“I feel like we should have protected her better.”

He would have to get her home soon since she seemed to be forgetting to put on the accent. In that last sentence she had only half-heartedly added a hard edge to the word “better”.

“How could we have known?” Angela asked, reaching out for Parker’s hand.

To his surprise, she didn’t draw back, but instead lifted his gaze to his. He shook his head very slightly and they reached a silent agreement not to tell Angela about the thrown rock into their window yet.

She did, however, know about the incident in the aquarium.

“Do you think the thrown rock in the atrium of the aquarium had something to do with this?” he asked, eager to hear Angela’s opinion. She was a wise woman and thought in ways that his very rational mind often neglected.

“If that was the case, it would have been a warning,” Angela said.

“But against what? What would we be warned about?”

Angela rested her chin on her hand and swirled the dark liquid in her glass around thoughtfully.

“What if it wasn’t us who was warned, but Amanda?”

Parker furrowed her brow. “A little girl? What for?”

“She has never talked to the police or to anyone about that night when her mother was shot. She hasn’t said at word since that night.”

Jarod felt a pang of excitement.

“You think she knows something that someone doesn’t want her to tell anybody?”

Angela simply looked up at him and her gaze was so intense that he was reminded of a sphinx that had fixed her knowing gaze at him.

“I don’t know.”

The new day was already dawning when they returned to Thomas’ house. The rain had stopped for a while and the building was smothered in a fine grey fog that soaked their clothes and left a fine dampness on their skin.

The sky was a greyish blue and dark clouds were already appearing again, but for a moment, the house was silent and the otherwise ever-present sound of the rain was mercifully absent.

It hit Miss Parker when she stepped into the hall, that this was exactly the kind of silence that Thomas had left behind. She simply had never been able to succumb to it, since there had always been worse heartache every day that had drowned out the other feelings for Thomas every day.

Now that she was far away from the daily grief and anger, humiliation and sorrow, she could finally listen to what lay below it all.

She felt so lonely that she was almost ready to just turn to Jarod and throw herself at him. His earlier hesitation was the only thing that kept her from giving in to the urge.

Usually she would go to a bar, get dead drunk and make out with some mildly attractive man before she’d run away before she actually ended up in bed with him. It felt better to humiliate them by catching a cab just that last minute when they believed that they’d reached their goal for that night.

“We should try to get some sleep, “Jarod said. “The police will call us if they find anything. I made sure of that.”

Miss Parker nodded. “I still feel like there’s anything we’ve missed. Something that will allow us to see the bigger picture.”

She touched her hand to her forehead. “You go sleep. I don’t know how I could right now.” The forced snippy tone came across rather lame so he came close to touching the small of her back with his hand to guide her into the living-room before he could stop himself.

Instead he flipped the light-switch when he entered the room behind her.

He had never actually heard her scream, but she did so when the lights above the kitchen counter came on. And a second later he knew why.