Down the Darkest Road

28

It should have been my husband’s job to go after the man who took our daughter away from us. In another time—before lawyers, when the law was of the land and not a game—he would have had the right . . . No. He would have had a father’s obligation to defend his daughter, and a husband’s obligation to protect his family, to pronounce sentence and carry out punishment.

I could have lived in that time. When the night is long and the drink is strong, I can close my eyes and fantasize about a time when justice was swift and terrible, and left men like Roland Ballencoa nothing to hide behind.

Many people would argue that we live in more civilized times now, that we have elevated ourselves above base violence.

Those people have never had a child taken from them.

Lance could have lived in that darker time too. He was a man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and the belief that the shortest distance from A to B was always a straight line.

It had killed him that, even though suspicion had fallen on Roland Ballencoa, no one had been able to touch the man. The police had not been able to compel him to give them an interview, let alone take a polygraph exam. He hadn’t had to account for his time the day Leslie went missing. He hadn’t had to answer yes or no as to whether or not he had spoken to her that day.

Roland Ballencoa knew his rights as well as any man who had ever had to hide behind the shield of them. And he was absolutely without apology or remorse in exercising those rights.

Lance had grown up on television police dramas and movies where bad guys were hauled in and beat down and made to confess their sins like acolytes of Satan in the days of the Inquisition. It had been inconceivable to him that so much time had gone by—more than a year—by the time the Santa Barbara police had been granted a search warrant for Ballencoa’s home and vehicle. So much time that any evidence that may ever have been present was gone.

All but one tiny blood sample, too small to test.

That reality was my husband’s purgatory.

From the day that Leslie went missing, he never lived a day without the weight of guilt beating down on him like a war hammer. He blamed himself for losing his temper with Leslie that night at the restaurant. If he had handled that better . . . if he had damned his pride and let her stay home that night . . . if he had been firmer with her earlier on . . . if he had been more understanding . . .

He had damned himself from every possible angle, and punished himself with the brutality of an Old Testament God. And in the end he had pronounced sentence on himself, absent the power to do so to the man who had taken his child.

The most terrible burden that had been put on him, aside from what he had put on himself, had been the spotlight of suspicion that had been cast on him by the public, the press, and the police. He would have gladly lain down and died for either of his daughters. To have people think otherwise had been like pouring acid on his soul.

And the police—completely impotent to deal with Roland Ballencoa—had gone after Lance with the zeal of hunters shooting fish in a barrel. Because he wanted to cooperate, he sat through hours and hours of interviews and interrogations. He took polygraph after polygraph. He had weathered every indignity and accusation leveled at him.

He had fought with his daughter in public. He was known to have a temper. There were holes in the time line of his day that day, time unaccounted for. He wouldn’t have been the first father to lose his temper with a teenage daughter.

What if he had seen her on the road that day, riding her bike home from a softball game she had been forbidden to attend? Maybe he had stopped his car and grabbed her. Maybe in his anger he had shaken her or pushed her. Maybe she had struck her head and died. Maybe he had panicked. Maybe he had panicked and killed her, and yet had the presence of mind to dispose of her body so thoroughly it was never found.

Not once, not for one heartbeat had I ever believed Lance could have hurt Leslie. Not even after the detectives had done their best to drive a wedge of doubt between us. Not even after people who should have known Lance had begun to doubt. I would sooner have stopped breathing than stop believing in his innocence.

My husband’s death was ruled an accident, just another sad statistic against drinking and driving. Half the people who had suspected him of murder believed his death was karma. The other half turned on a dime and mourned him as the poor tormented father, unable to go on without his firstborn child.

His death was ruled an accident. I knew better. Everyone knew better. It was the truth hidden in plain view. He had driven willingly to his death with a police escort, metaphorically speaking. He simply had not been able to take it any longer—the grief, the guilt, the suspicion, the not knowing, the terrible imagining of what had happened to Leslie.

I have never and will never forgive him for what he did that night on the Cold Spring Canyon bridge. I understand better than anyone why he did it. Many nights I have envied him the peace of death and cursed him for leaving the burden of life and living on me.

And yet I loved him so, and still do. His absence punched a hole in my heart that aches every single day and all night long. We were supposed to walk this road hand in hand, side by side. Without him, I have no balance and no anchor.

I miss him with a longing that goes so deep I will never see the bottom of it.

As I look into my future I can’t envision the day that another man will make me feel the way he did. The friend who introduced us always said that Lance and I picked up a conversation where we had left off in another lifetime. I know it will be another lifetime before I feel that again.

Lauren saved her work and got up from the desk. She felt as empty as a ghost, as if anyone could pass a hand right through her and touch nothing. She had nothing left, not even emotion. What a blessing that was. She didn’t have to feel the hopelessness of a lonely future that stretched out in front of her like a deserted road.

She thanked God she had driven away most of the former friends who would have made it their mission to fix her up and marry her off. And her general disposition had served to ward off most of the men who might have taken a shot.

Only once in the last two years had she let her guard down enough to allow a man near her, and then only for mercenary reasons—or so she told herself. She didn’t want to think of herself as a woman with a woman’s sexual needs. Better to believe she had slept with Greg Hewitt as a means to a practical end. She felt like a whore either way.

She put it out of her head now as if it had meant nothing at all.

It wasn’t late—just nine thirty—but the house was quiet. Leah hadn’t been feeling well when Lauren picked her up at the ranch. She had barely eaten dinner and had gone to bed not long after.

Anne Leone had told Lauren her daughter had done fine at her sleepover, but in practically the next breath had expressed her concern that Leah was possibly wound too tight, masking feelings that would have to find an outlet somewhere. And it was true. Leah was very good at masking her feelings. She didn’t like calling attention to herself. Where Leslie had always felt the need to challenge and push boundaries, Leah had always contained herself and meticulously followed every rule. She had always been the perfect child.

Lauren had to admit she had too often been willing to take advantage of that in these years since Leslie’s abduction. The burden of it all was exhausting. If her remaining child chose not to come to her with problems or fears or feelings too difficult to deal with, it was so much easier for her to accept relief than question that illusion of peace. Don’t borrow trouble, her own mother always said. Don’t borrow trouble when you can just ignore it.

She went to her daughter’s room now. A light was still glowing through the crack of the barely open door. Lauren knocked softly and pushed the door open another couple of inches.

Leah hastily swiped tears off her cheeks and pulled the covers up around her. She sat tucked up against the headboard, hugging a pillow. In that instant she looked eight instead of nearly sixteen. A little girl lost in sadness.

“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Lauren said quietly, coming to sit on the edge of the bed.

“I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not,” Lauren said softly, reaching out to touch her daughter’s cheek. “Sad?”

The tears welled up and over her lashes like big raindrops. “I miss Daddy.”

“I do too, baby,” Lauren confessed, taking Leah in her arms and holding her close. “I miss him so much.”

She couldn’t help but wonder where they would be if Lance hadn’t left them. Would they have pulled themselves together by now? Would they have found some way to cope? Would they have left Santa Barbara? Or would the wound have closed up around them and scarred over, the memory of it fading over time?

Or would they have come apart at the seams? The statistics of marriages surviving the loss of a child had been against them. Guilt and blame infected relationships. The differences in how each partner handled the grief often caused resentment.

Lauren would never have given up or given in on the idea of finding Leslie. Would Lance?

“I’m doing the best I can, sweetheart,” she murmured, not sure if her words were for Leah or for her husband.

“I know, Mommy,” Leah whispered.

“Do you know how much I love you?” Lauren asked.

Leah nodded.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded again, looking down.

Lauren knew that was a lie told for her benefit, and as she had done so many times, she accepted it as truth, more willing to take the brief hit of guilt than find out what kind of disaster might be brewing behind door number two. Even if she vowed not to, she would put off changing her ways for another night, using exhaustion as an excuse.

She kissed her daughter’s forehead and told her to get some sleep, and hoped that Anne Leone was wrong.

In the hall, she went to the window that looked out on the front yard, her skin crawling at the memory of last night. He had been out there, looking in at her. Tonight she had twice seen county cruisers turn around in front of the gate. Detective Mendez’s doing, she supposed.

She went downstairs and made yet another patrol, checking locks on doors and windows before going to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea. She thought again of Anne as she went about the task. She liked Anne’s no-nonsense yet compassionate way. She wondered if maybe Anne was the better person to help Leah on her path through the grief of losing her sister and her father. Lauren knew she herself wasn’t qualified to help anyone. For her to help Leah was like sending a person who couldn’t swim to save a drowning man. The blind leading the blind, as Anne had said.

She thought of little Haley Leone, the only witness to a terrible crime—her mother murdered literally before her very eyes. Anne and her husband had given the child stability, safety, security. Lauren didn’t feel as if she could offer any of those things to her own daughter—or even to herself.

She wondered how Leah would feel about talking with Anne.

Lauren curled into a corner of the sofa in front of the great room’s massive stone fireplace and sipped her tea. She thought of Leah before all of this had happened—Leah as a little girl Haley’s age and a little older—and realized she wasn’t exactly right in thinking her youngest didn’t share her feelings.

She remembered long quiet talks with Leah about all kinds of things—her love of butterflies and her kindness for children who were different or awkward, her sense of fair play and justice, her very serious concerns about hurting the feelings of her favorite dolls when she became too grown up to play with them.

No, Lauren thought, Leah wasn’t a child who closed herself off; she was a young lady too sensitive to her mother’s fragility. She was a shy younger sister pushed into the shadows by a sibling whose presence was huge and bright, even in her absence.

What a sorry excuse for a mother you are, Lauren.

She was more concerned with vengeance for the daughter she didn’t have than with being a parent to the daughter she did have.

She would talk to Anne.

Setting her cup on the coffee table, she picked up the pile of the day’s mail and began to sort through it. Bills and junk mail. An invitation to join a gym. A brochure advertising all the events of the upcoming summer festival of music.

It always struck her as odd how the rest of the world went around the catastrophes of the people in it, like water parting around boulders in a river and running on as if it didn’t matter. That was life. It just kept going, whether any one person wanted it to or not.

The Oak Knoll Summer Festival of Music was going to go on as planned without anyone caring that Roland Ballencoa had come to live in their midst, or that Lauren Lawton was struggling with the need to do something about that.

She set the brochure aside and went on to the next piece of mail, a plain ivory envelope with no address and no stamp.

Her heart began to pound. No address, no stamp.

Goose bumps prickled her skin.

The flap of the envelope was stuck shut just at its very point. She popped it free with a flick of her thumb, pulled the card from it, and read the single typed line.

Did you miss me?