Free Dream Country by Luanne Rice Page B

picture had been taken fourteen years ago, and it showed Daisy and James on horseback, each holding a two-year-old twin on the saddle in front of them.
    Daisy was dressed in chaps, a blue chambray shirt, and a white Stetson. Her skin glowed from a summer in the mountains, but not half as bright as her smile. She embraced Jake from behind, pointing so he’d smile at the camera. James held Sage. He’d been afraid she might fall off the horse, so he was looking straight down at the top of her head, gripping her so tight his biceps and forearms were flexed. That’s how it had been back then—keeping hold of his family in this vast country had been the most important thing on his mind.
    “Little one.” He said the name he had once used for his daughter.
    She was on a freight train, heading cross-country to see him. Daisy had called the police, and they were going to intercept her, make sure she got back to her mother safely. That’s what James wanted, what he prayed for now. But holding the picture, unable to put it down, he knew he wanted something even more.
    For his daughter to come home. He wanted Daisy’s mind set at ease; he wanted his daughter to be safe. But his arms ached to hold her, just as they’d ached for his son all these years.
    If she made it to Wyoming before getting caught, he’d give her the biggest talking-to a daughter ever got. He’d warn her against all the maniacs you could meet and all the accidents that could happen, against worrying her mother half crazy. James Tucker shivered to think of his daughter
out there,
and he shook his head, telling himself it was wrong to wish she’d slip through the dragnet and come to the ranch.
    Before he sent her straight back east.

Chapter Seven
    F our days without Sage passed. Daisy found the waiting torture. What would Sage eat? Where would she sleep? What kinds of people was she encountering out there? How far along was her pregnancy? The thoughts swirled around and around her mind. She worked to dull them, to keep herself from replaying her talk with James. She had held back from telling him Sage was pregnant: She wanted to protect her daughter from that hard reality for as long as she could.
    When word got out about Sage and Ben being missing, it was as if a stranger had come to Silver Bay. There was a feeling of curiosity, danger, and sorrow all mixed together. Not everyone had heard about the notes, but most people had seen the state police with their dogs sniffing along the railroad tracks long into the night.
    Silver Bay was a postcard-pretty New England town. It had two white churches that artists came from all over the country to paint. The garden club placed stone pots at most intersections, cascading with ivy, petunias, and white geraniums all summer long. The schools were excellent, the crime rate almost nonexistent. Daisy had grown up about ten miles down the shoreline, and she had chosen to come here after the divorce because Silver Bay seemed like the place least likely to pose a threat to her only surviving child.
    Other mothers felt the same way. They checked their own children’s eyes for signs of drug use, smelled their breath while kissing them good night. Talking about Sage Tucker and Ben Davis, they paid extra attention to the differences—the characteristics that set those children apart from their children—proof that the same thing couldn’t happen in their homes.
    When people stopped by Daisy’s to drop off casseroles, homemade preserves, frozen lasagnas, she was working in her back room. Hunched over her worktable, her long-necked lamp trained on the bone she was carving, she ignored the doorbell. The persistent ringing reminded her of how it had been after Jake disappeared, how people equated grief with hunger, as if there was any food in the world that could fill that dreadful space.
    Hathaway let herself in with her key. Daisy looked up when her sister came through the door.
    “I just met Felicity Evans on your porch,”