The Missing

the same line for the past five minutes, Cullen finally gave up and shut the laptop down. The faint scratch of pencil on paper had him glancing over. The early hour wasn’t affecting all of them. Nice to see.

    “What are you working on, beautiful?”

    Big green eyes looked up at him. Jillian was as beautiful as an angel, Cullen thought. He’d thought so from the first time he’d seen her, nine years ago, when the doctor wrapped her tiny, red little body in a blanket and placed her in his arms. Jilly’s mom had died due to complications from childbirth. She’d held Jillian for half an hour, a miserly thirty minutes, before the nurses took the baby to do a more thorough exam on the newborn. Five minutes after the nurses had taken Jilly, Kim had looked at him and smiled. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

    It was the last thing Kim ever said. She drifted off to sleep, and while she was sleeping, she’d started to bleed again. The doctors couldn’t get it to stop, and Cullen had stood there, stunned into silence, as his wife died.

    It had come as a complete and total shock to everybody, including Cullen. How could he lose his wife in childbirth? Women died in childbirth a hundred years ago. Even fifty years ago. But in 1999? He just couldn’t wrap his brain around it, even now.

    Jilly had inherited her mother’s big green eyes, rosebud mouth, and artistic talent. The girl might as well have been born with a pencil and sketch pad in hand. It had been that artistic talent that had landed her in an advanced school when she was only three years old. She had a grasp of light and shadow that many adults lacked, Cullen had been told when he’d met with Arlene Willington.

    Fancy way of saying the girl could draw, Cullen had always figured, but Arlene was right. No matter how she said it, Jilly was gifted. Even aside from her skill with a pencil, the girl was special in ways that Cullen couldn’t even begin to understand, although he wasn’t exactly a stranger to it.

    He studied the faces on the sketch pad she showed him and asked, “Are they friends of yours?” Jilly had drawn three kids who didn’t look familiar to him: a younger girl who was probably only five or six, and then two older ones, about the same age as Jilly. The boy was black, and he had a wide, mischievous smile. Both of the girls were white, one was probably in her early teens. It was the younger one, though, that really caught Cullen’s attention. She looked like a little angel, all big eyes, long hair, and dimples. Although the pencil sketch was in black and white, he imagined the girl’s hair was pale blonde. Jillian’s talent amazed him. How a nine-year-old could draw something like that, so true to life, was just astounding.

    Jilly shook her head. Fat, inky black curls bounced around her heart-shaped face, and she took the sketch pad back. “No. I don’t know who they are.” She reached out, stroked the tip of one finger down one penciled face. The little cherub. “She was the first one.”

    A voice came over the speaker, and a bored airline attendant announced a slight delay. Delay. Hell, wasn’t that great? Bad weather had grounded their flight yesterday, and Cullen had accepted the red-eye for today. He had a signing and some Q and A deal at a library tomorrow, and he’d really wanted the downtime. It was starting to look as though he just wasn’t supposed to have any downtime.

    Distracted, Cullen glanced at Jilly and asked, “The first to what?”

    “The first to disappear.”

    A chill ran down Cullen’s back, and he stopped, looked at the sketch pad, then back up at Jilly’s face. “Disappear from where?”

    Jilly just shrugged. “Around.” She sighed and bent back over the sketchbook, shutting her worried father out. He was used to it. When she was working on something, she worked with a single-minded focus. Normally, it didn’t bother him. Today? Different story. “Where did she disappear from, baby?”

    Jilly muttered something under her breath. She caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and her eyes scrunched down to slits. Recognizing the signs, Cullen reached out and caught a black curl. He tugged sharply and waited for her to look up at him. At first, her eyes were foggy and unfocused. They cleared, and when he knew she was paying attention to him, he said flatly, “Tell me about this girl.”

    The firm, I-am-the-parent-and-you-will-answer-me tone still worked on Jilly, for the most part. She