Free A Face at the Window by Sarah Graves Page B

sit tight, and call me if anyone calls you."
    Sit down. Shut up. Stay out of it. "Yes. Yes, I understand," she answered obediently, keeping her voice low. Because feeling the way she did, suddenly—scared, angry, and frustrated in the extreme—if she raised it even a little bit she might scream the whole place down.
    "I'll get the numbers for you," she said.
    Back in the bad old days, Jake Tiptree had been a hotshot Manhattan money-manager with a brain-surgeon husband, a son just entering puberty, and an Upper East Side penthouse looking out over Central Park in a building so exclusive that you practically needed an FBI background check just to deliver pizza there.
    Unfortunately her husband had turned out to be even better at adultery than at surgery, which was how she reached the point one day of standing alone in her fancy kitchen with a broken wineglass in her right hand, frowning thoughtfully at the skin of her left wrist. But then the phone rang and it was a client needing to be talked off a financial ledge, and by the time she got done handling him she'd also crept back down off her own.
    Months later, though, driving home alone from New Brunswick, Canada, after a stockholders’ meeting, she'd stopped overnight in Eastport, Maine. And although until then she'd had no interest in old houses, home repair, or (God forbid) power tools, she'd fallen in love.
    With the house: enormous, antique, and to her unskilled eyecharmingly dilapidated. With the town, salt-scoured and severely lovely, set by the water's edge at the end of a curving causeway so low that she could almost reach out through the car window to dabble her hand in the ice-cold waves.
    And with the idea of a life that did not include a husband whose brain was habitually occupied so far south of his cranium, it was a wonder he remembered how to operate on anyone else's.
    Also, in Eastport Sam might just possibly not grow up to be a monster. No guarantees, but for one thing the apparent absence of exotic, lab-quality pharmaceuticals seemed like a good omen; even then, he'd had a worrisome taste for illegal substances.
    So she'd moved from Times Square to fresh air in one dumb jump, as her by-then-ex-husband criticized the decision. But it had, as Sam told her much later when he'd been clean, sober, and halfway rational for seven whole weeks, made all the difference.
    Since then she'd worked on the old house through moments of extreme happiness as well as through turmoil and disruption: her marriage to Wade, Sam's relapses and recoveries, her father's return to her life after so long, her ex-husband's death. Even the news that Ozzie Campbell was finally to be tried for her mother's murder went down easier with a paintbrush in her hand, and the breaks she took from working on her victim's impact statement had been oddly soothed by the creak of a prybar or slam of a hammer.
    Thus, by two-thirty in the afternoon on the day Lee White-Valentine and her baby-sitter Helen Nevelson were taken, Jake was back at the sidewalk hole in front of her old house. Bob Arnold had called twice; once to get the number of the villa where Ellie White and George Valentine were to be staying, and again to ask if she wanted him to get hold of Wade, and ask him to come home.
    "Don't bother him. He'll call when he can," she'd replied, thinking that if their situations were reversed, Bob would not be asking if Wade wanted his spouse summoned in off the disabled freighter currently stalled in the Bay of Fundy, where despite the bright day a line of thunderstorms was forecast for tonight.
    Bob meant well, though, she reminded herself as she frowned at the bag of concrete mix. By his renewed invitation, too, to stay the night with him and Clarissa and the kids. He just didn't realize that now, even the touch of the warm late summer air on her skin made her want to howl.
    The harmless chatter of his children, and Clarissa's gentle concern, would only be fresh torture, reminding her of Ellie and