The Missing

good thing they didn’t happen too often. He’d spent most of his life trapped inside a guilt-induced rage.

    Guilt and need colored too much of his life as it was. If these dreams came more often than they did, he’d probably end up on a shrink’s couch. And he didn’t have time for that.

    From somewhere in the house, he heard music, and he glanced at the clock. Seven thirty. Shit. He’d wanted to be up an hour ago. They had too much stuff to do today, and now he was going to be running late.

    “Daddy . . .” There was a knock on his door. Years of experience kept him from reacting when the door swung open, and he saw his daughter standing there with an expectant look on her face. He shifted his armload of sheets and blankets a little lower, just in case.

    “Gimme a few minutes, Jilly,” he said. “Overslept.”

    She grinned at him and said, “Hurry up, sleepyhead.”

    She slammed the door behind her, and automatically, he called out, “Don’t slam the doors.” Then he looked down at his armful of sheets. He didn’t have time to mess with them right now, so he carried them into the bathroom and opened the closet in there, dumping them into the hamper. Marci, the cleaning lady, would be in while they were gone, and she’d make the bed with clean sheets, and he could wash the dirty ones when he got back.

    Too bad he couldn’t deal with the lingering echoes of the dream just as easily.

    The haunted look in Taige’s eyes bothered him. A lot. She wouldn’t tell him what was going on, and Cullen knew from experience that if she wasn’t going to share what had caused those shadows, he may never know.

    Thinking of her, the weird, too-real dreams, Cullen found himself walking out of his bathroom and into the office that was on the other side of his bedroom. He opened the connecting door and went to the bookshelf that spanned the entire northern wall. On the top shelf, out of Jillian’s reach, was a fat leather album. Inside it were pictures, newspaper articles, some clipped from the paper and some printed off the Web, all of Taige Branch.

    He’d seen the first one nine years ago, the day after Jilly was born. He’d been looking through the fat Sunday paper. The nurse came in, bringing Jilly with her, and Cullen had tossed the paper onto the narrow, uncomfortable couch. A section slid to the floor, and when he picked it up a few minutes later, time froze.

    Down in the bottom right corner on the last page of the section was Taige. It wasn’t a great picture. She had sunglasses on and was looking away from the camera. The bold caption above the picture read, “Local Psychic Saves Kidnapped Child.”

    It had happened in Mobile. Some thug pulled a woman out of her car at a stoplight and either didn’t see the baby sleeping in the back or didn’t care. Two days of nonstop searching had turned up nothing. Then a college sophomore showed up at the police department. She’d said she could find the baby. Cullen knew that must have been hard for her, going there and knowing she’d be ridiculed, and after she helped, she’d become the focus of rampant speculation.

    As promised, and without any help from the police, she’d found the baby. All it had taken was getting to the mom’s side. The paper didn’t detail what all had happened beyond her finding the child, but Cullen had done some digging. After the police found the baby exactly where Taige had told them to find her, they had arrested her on suspicion of kidnapping.

    The charges were dropped only after they failed to find any evidence at all linking her to the carjacker turned kidnapper, but not until she’d spent a week in jail. Nobody had come to post bail, and by the time Cullen knew a damn thing, she’d been released.

    There were other stories, some of them no more than a paragraph or two and others that were nearly full-page stories featuring color pictures and interviews with people who claimed to know her. Dante and Rose had been mentioned in a few, always with something along the lines of “No comment” when asked about Taige Branch. A couple of enterprising reporters had even unearthed some of the kids she had helped when she was younger.

    The most recent article was nearly two years old. She’d either gotten better at keeping her name out of things, or she had people helping her on that end. He had a feeling it was a combination of both. Over the past few years it was getting harder to find any information about her,