Relentless

decide what next. Emily and Sarah, our girls, only six and seven, didn’t know their grandparents were murdered, but they were sensitive kids, they knew something was wrong.”
    The previous thin edge of pain in his voice had grown sharper, past distress now, short of anguish, but cutting ever deeper as he approached the recollection of his next loss.
    “For the girls, Margie and I tried to pass the trip off as a vacation. Took them to a kid-friendly restaurant. Back at the motel, the girls went fast asleep in one of the beds, in spite of TV-news chatter. Margie wanted a hot shower. Closed the bathroom door so she wouldn’t disturb the girls. I watched … I watched … the news.”
    A Peterbilt roared past the Mountaineer, traveling too fast for road conditions, flinging up a sheet of water from the puddled pavement. Cascades overwhelmed the wipers, and for too long we were blinded. All that might lie ahead vanished from view.
    “I thought I’d see something on the news about my folks, butnothing. Then … Margie was a long time in the bathroom. I knocked, she didn’t answer. I went in to see if she was okay, but she … she wasn’t there.”
    John paused. His breathing was quick and shallow. Before it quickened further, he worked to control it.
    Ordinarily, in weather this foul, I might have suggested to Penny that she pull off the highway and wait for the torrents to diminish. But stopping in this lonely night seemed like an invitation to Death, and I preferred hurtling half-blind into the downpour.
    John continued: “The shower was running, stall door open. Her underwear, her robe on the floor. There was a double-hung frosted window. Bottom sash was up, curtains billowing. How could he have taken her so quietly, no struggle? I went out through the window. Behind the motel was a field, an endless field, far away a line of trees, all visible under a full moon, nobody out there, nobody.”
    Penny whispered my name, wanting to know something of what John was saying. I glanced at her but shook my head.
    The sight of her flooded me with apprehension—that she would vanish like Margaret Clitherow, that she would turn a corner and not be there when an instant later I rounded the same corner, that she would walk from one room into another and be gone forever.
    “The motel had three wings. I found my way around to the front,” John recalled, “sure I’d see her being forced into a car. But the night was quiet. No one in sight. Only the desk clerk in the motel office, watching TV. Then I saw the door of our room standing open. I thought … I
knew
… I left the girls alone, now they were gone, too.”
    Another massive truck began to pass the Mountaineer, its array of running lights blurring as it cast up blinding sheets of water. Penny eased up on the accelerator to let the rig get past us more quickly, and I almost urged her to keep the pedal down.
    “But in the motel room, the girls were asleep, just as I’d left them.
    But on the second bed … sparkling on the bedspread … Margie’s engagement ring, wedding band. I knew then she was dead or as good as dead. He wouldn’t taunt me with the rings if she were nearby where I might find her. Explaining this to cops in a strange town—no chance. They’d think she walked out on me. The returned rings proved it. No abductor would return her rings. Waxx did it once, he could do it twice, the girls would be next. I had to think only of the girls.”
    Guilt twisted his voice. He believed he failed Margaret. Even if that was not true, he would always believe it.
    I said, “Take your time. If it’s too much now, you can call me later. Or not at all.”
    “No. I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I
have
to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “So I threw into the suitcases what little we’d taken out of them. Emily and Sarah were so sound asleep, they hardly stirred when I carried them out to our SUV and belted them in the backseat. When I drove away, no one followed us. But no one had followed us from home to the motel, not for a hundred miles.”
    “Credit card,” I said, remembering the warnings he had given me.
    “Yeah. I thought—the American Express I used at the motel. You see in movies, they can track you like that. But this wasn’t the FBI. This was a half-baked book critic with no more resources for tracking someone than
I
have. So maybe he planted something on our SUV.”
    I said, “Some kind of transponder or something.”
    “So I