Can't Stop Loving You Page 9

  They looked at the list of tantalizing specials printed on the menu. He said he wanted to try the raspberry pancakes, and she said she was thinking of having the spinach quiche. Then the waitress came, and they both ordered french toast. They laughed about it after she had walked away.

  “I thought you were having quiche,” Noah said.

  “I thought you were having raspberry pancakes.”

  “I’ll have them tomorrow. I’m in the mood for french toast.”

  “Tomorrow?” she echoed, poised with her hand on a packet of sugar for the coffee the waitress had just poured her. “Are you going to stay, then?”

  “I’m not sure.” His eyes stopped twinkling. “I’m supposed to be at work, but until I know what’s going on up here…I just don’t see how I can leave.”

  “What will you do? Call in sick?”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind quitting, but I guess I shouldn’t do that, huh? What do you think? Should I just quit tomorrow?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was teasing. There was a bitterness in his tone that seemed out of character, but then, she reminded herself, what did she really know about his character? He wasn’t the same person he had been. She no longer knew him, despite the glimpses of familiarity.

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “I wish.” He dumped another sugar packet into the coffee the waitress had just warmed up for him, then stirred it moodily.

  “I take it you really don’t enjoy your job.”

  “Not in the least bit.”

  “So how did you fall into it in the first place?”

  He looked her in the eye. “It was my wife’s idea.”

  The phrase my wife gave her a little twinge of pain. Yes, he was divorced—or almost divorced—but he had loved another woman.

  Another woman had been his bride and shared his bed and his world while Mariel was off living her lonely life in Rockton.

  “She wanted you to be in advertising?” she asked, hoping he didn’t sense what she was thinking.

  “She wanted me to fit into her world,” Noah said, surprising her with his blunt, straightforward reply. Last night he had seemed cagey when he was talking about his marriage.

  Now, he said, “Kelly’s an attorney. She’s from a privileged background, and she’s used to a certain standard of living. A struggling writer wasn’t her idea of husband material. I guess it wasn’t mine, either. I was getting my master’s in English from NYU when I met her, and she was impressed by that. But after I got it, she set up a bunch of interviews for me through connections she had. Most of them were for creative positions in ad agencies. She said PR and publishing didn’t pay enough.”

  “You would rather have been in PR or publishing?”

  “I would rather have been a bartender or a word processing temp while I worked on my screenplays,” he said with a shrug, and sipped his coffee.

  “So you went into advertising for your wife, and you were miserable.” Mariel shook her head. “Now that she’s out of your life, can’t you do something else?”

  “I was about to,” he said, setting his cup carefully back on the saucer.

  “When…what?”

  “Hmm?” He looked up at her blankly.

  “You were about to do something else, when what happened?”

  “When you e-mailed me,” he said with a shrug. “I was sitting there last night in my apartment—God, it seems like months ago—and I was about to get on-line and start looking for opportunities.”

  “What kind of opportunities?”

  “I don’t know. Cheap places to live, or interesting jobs…something different. Something that would take me out of my life. And then I got your e-mail, and I just blew out of town, and here I am.”

  “You’re here because of Amber, though…right?” she asked, suddenly wondering how sincere his worry had been.

  “Of course I’m here because of Amber.” The urgent, troubled expression on his face instantly erased her doubts. “And as soon as we finish eating, we’re going to head over to talk to the Steadmans.”

  She nodded. “I was wondering if you thought we should call first.”

  He shook his head and said darkly, “Why give them a chance to prepare? Let’s see what they’re really like.”

  “It’s probably a long shot, Noah, that we’re going to find out anything from them that will be a clue to what happened to Amber. They’re her parents. They’re not going to want to talk to us when they find out who we are, and they’re probably going crazy trying to find her. Chances are, they had nothing to do with what happened to her.”

  “You said yourself that the police think she ran away.”

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Kids don’t run away from happy homes, Mariel,” he said.

  She just shrugged, thinking of her own past. Of the parents who had doted on her, tried to give her everything, and of how she had spent every moment of her childhood waiting for the moment when she could flee.

  But then, she hadn’t really run away.

  She had been eighteen, going off to college.

  Amber had simply disappeared on her way to school one day.

  The chilling implication settled over Mariel, and she met Noah’s intent gaze across the table. “You’re right,” she said. “Something had to be wrong. Unless she didn’t run away. What if she was abducted?”

  His face was grim. “One thing at a time, Mariel, okay?”

  She nodded, once again grateful for his presence. “Okay,” she said, as the waitress arrived with maple syrup and butter.

  The drive to Valley Falls took longer than Noah expected. He and his frat brothers had made road trips there a few times back in his college days, to go to the mall or to a club called the Black Door, where there were live bands and a two-drink minimum on weekends. Now there was a Cracker Barrel Restaurant where the club used to stand, and the two-lane highway was under construction in several spots, mostly to accommodate new shopping centers or town house developments.

  “I don’t remember any of this being here,” he commented to Mariel as they passed a sprawling plaza with a big Home Depot and a bigger Wal-Mart. “This whole area is being built up.”

  “It’s great,” she said. “I wish there was a Wal-Mart in Rockton.”

  “It’s great? How can you say that?” He slowed the car, spotting another orange-clad flag man ahead. “Places like this should stay rural. That’s what makes them desirable.”

  “Spoken like a true city boy,” she said with a laugh. “Or maybe not. Maybe that’s a sign you need to get out of the city.”

  “When I come up here and see them tearing down trees and putting up those ugly concrete dime-a-dozen buildings, it makes me crazy.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever lived in a place like Rockton. Most of the time, I would kill for decent pizza or a place to buy a pair of jeans without driving for forty-five minutes.”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way,” he admitted. He wanted to ask her why she was there, then, if she wasn’t happy with small-town life. But she had turned her head away, toward the window, and he took that as a signal that she sensed what was on his mind and didn’t want to talk about it.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. He thought about how one minute, it was strangely comfortable to be with her again, and the next, it was awkward as hell. He felt as though he had been on a roller coaster ever since he had seen her in the hall last night. Kissing her certainly hadn’t helped matters any, considering that he had spent most of the time since wondering when and how and if he could do it again.

  This, after he had sworn to himself, and to her, that it wasn’t going to happen again.

  But now that he had reconnected with Mariel again, he couldn’t think straight. He never had been able to when she was around; that was the problem. She had a way of working her way in so that he couldn’t focus on what he should be doing. It had always been like that with her, and he should have kno
wn it wouldn’t change.

  If only she didn’t look as appealing as ever—and so drastically different from Kelly. His wife had been one of those super-thin, high-strung city women—elegant and sophisticated and well dressed. Kelly was beautiful enough to turn heads on the street, with her perfect features and her straight, pale blond hair and statuesque figure. She had certainly turned his head, Noah reminded himself.

  But he had definitely had his fill of her. And in the end, she had turned out to be an ice princess.

  Whereas in the end, Mariel had turned out to be…

  Well, it wasn’t the end with her yet, after all, and he didn’t know what she was.

  Hard as he had tried to convince himself that she was selfish and cold and undeserving of his forgiveness, much less his love, he now realized that nothing was as cut and dried as he had tried to make it. He wanted to believe that she had given up their child—and him—so that she could go off and become a globe-trotting actress.

  But here she was, back in the hometown she had always said she hated, teaching first grade. She was living the life she had never wanted. He remembered conversations they had had early in their relationship, right after they had met—how passionately she had talked about what she was going to do with her life, and how she was going to make something of herself. She didn’t want marriage or children—he clearly remembered that she had said that. It had struck a chord in him when she said it because even at eighteen, he knew that someday he wanted to be a husband and a father, and he thought that was what most people expected from their lives.

  Not Mariel.

  And here she was, still single. No children.

  Why couldn’t he just accept that she had known her limitations even back then?

  “Noah! Turn here,” she said abruptly, and he realized that he had been about to pass the intersection of Route 21, which led into Valley Falls.

  He steered the car around the corner and headed down the wide road toward town. On both sides were large old-fashioned houses fronted by porches and green lawns and towering maples and oaks that cast dappled shade. Everywhere he looked there were American flags and flower boxes spilling over with blooms; swingsets and sandboxes and romping dogs and children on tricycles.

  As they got closer to town there were a few more cars, a few more people. The road and parking lot in front of a picturesque white church were lined with cars, and the steeple bells were chiming. They passed a family walking hurriedly toward the church, obviously late for mass—the wife enormously pregnant and walking with the typical bow-legged backward tilt, the husband bending toward the toddler, whose arms were up stretched, and swinging the child up to be carried on his shoulders.

  That’s what I want, Noah thought. He wanted it so badly that he ached inside.

  He wanted it all. The small-town life, the house with the yard, the wife, the child, the baby on the way. He wondered if the man he had passed knew how lucky he was—whether he was content and grateful every day for what he had.

  Mariel’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

  “You should probably park so that we can ask someone where Berry Street is,” she said, clutching a piece of paper on which she had scribbled the Steadmans’ address back at the inn. They had found it by simply dialing information. “Unless you want to just drive around and see if we come across it. Valley Falls isn’t that big.”

  “No, we’ll stop and ask someone,” he said quickly. He didn’t want to drive around catching glimpses of other people’s lives—lives he coveted and would never have. The sooner they found the Steadmans, the better.

  Mariel stared up at the house on Berry Street.

  It was a white colonial with black shutters, a tidy, sunny yard, and an attached two-car garage. Along the brick foundation on either side of the small concrete stoop, clumps of healthy peony shrubs bent under the weight of their colossal pink blooms, fronted by a border of white impatiens that looked as though it needed a good soaking and some shelter from the hot midafternoon sun.

  Mariel found herself irritated by the fact that whoever had planted the impatiens didn’t know that the annuals needed lots of water and shade. What kind of person would just plop the plants into an unsuitable environment?

  The kind of person who would mistreat an adopted daughter.

  She knew she was being ridiculous—rather, that she was possibly being ridiculous—but she couldn’t help herself. She was looking at the Steadman residence with a critical eye, seeking evidence that the people who were raising her daughter were lousy human beings.

  “What do you think?” Noah asked beside her, and she remembered that he was there.

  She turned to look at him and saw that he, too, was giving the house an appraising, narrow-eyed stare.

  “They don’t take proper care of their garden,” she said darkly.

  He blinked, then motioned at the flowerbeds. “In all fairness, the garden looks pretty good to me.”

  “That’s because you’re from New York City. Anything remotely green looks good to you. The peonies are lowmaintenance perennials, but trust me, they’re abusing their impatiens.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever that means. Come on, let’s go.”

  They got out of the car and headed up the short walk toward the house. Mariel glanced at the other houses on the residential block and concluded that this was an upper-middle-class neighborhood, probably with many of the houses occupied by young families judging by the number of lawns scattered with various plastic riding toys and wagons. A few of the neighbors were in sight—mothers watching over toddlers, and senior citizens watering or mowing lawns. But aside from a casual glance or two, nobody seemed to be paying any attention to Mariel and Noah as they walked toward the Steadmans’ front door.

  As Noah raised his hand to knock, Mariel saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked sharply at the picture window to the right of the door just in time to see the curtain flutter back into place.

  Somebody had been watching their arrival.

  The door was answered immediately.

  Mariel recognized Carl Steadman from the photo in the newspaper. He wasn’t a handsome man, with aviatorstyle glasses and a fringe of dark hair around a broad patch of shiny scalp. He wasn’t much taller than Mariel’s five-six, and he wore a white polo shirt that was almost identical to Noah’s, but he had matched his with navy shorts, navy socks, and sandals. Mariel couldn’t help comparing the two men, and realized that she might feel sorry for Carl Steadman if she were convinced that he had done nothing to cause his daughter’s disappearance. As it was, she regarded him warily, and noticed that the attitude was mutual.

  “Yes? How can I help you?” the man asked as a woman appeared behind him.

  Mariel saw that it was his wife, and knew instinctively that it was she who had been watching from the window. She hadn’t known to expect company. Did she often sit in the window, looking out into the street? Was she distraught, restless, keeping an eye out for her lost daughter?

  Realizing that it wasn’t a far-fetched scenario, Mariel pushed away any empathetic feelings she might have for Joanne Steadman. As far as she was concerned, the woman was the enemy until proven otherwise.

  It didn’t help her case that she looked so distinctly …motherly. So different from Mariel herself. A pair of glasses was perched on her short blond hair, and the frames were connected to a chain she wore around her neck. Her eyes lacked make-up and were faintly lined with middle age, or worry. Possibly both. She wore pale blue slacks, flats, and a short-sleeved white blouse—a nondescript style typical of middle-aged midwestern PTO mothers, Mariel thought.

  She was a matronly woman who probably never wore jeans and sneakers, and didn’t get David Letterman’s jokes, and had her car radio tuned to an easy listening station. Mariel couldn’t help comparing herself to Joanne Steadman and wondering which of them Amber would choose for a mother, and hating herself for wondering that.

  “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Steadman,” Noah was sayin
g. “We’re sorry to bother you…”

  We’re sorry to bother you. Mariel found herself noticing his casual use of the pronoun—noticing that it seemed to come naturally for him, as though they were still a couple.

  She knew it meant nothing, yet she found a strange comfort in it. A strange sense of belonging that she hadn’t felt since…

  Well, since those early days in his arms, before the world had come crashing down around them.

  “How can we help you?” Carl Steadman asked Noah, looking from him to Mariel.

  “We’re concerned about your daughter,” Noah said after a moment’s hesitation.

  Again, his use of a pronoun jumped out at Mariel. This time it was your. Your daughter.

  But Amber isn’t their daughter—she’s ours, she thought illogically, as the Steadmans’ expressions tightened noticeably.

  There was silence.

  Feeling the edge of her own rising anxiety, Mariel jumped to fill it, blurting, “We were wondering if you’ve had any new information about where your daughter might be.”

  “Who are you?” Joanne Steadman asked finally, visibly upset.

  And as her eyes met Amber’s adoptive mother’s eyes, Mariel realized that the question was inconsequential.

  She knows, she thought.

  Somehow, Joanne Steadman had guessed their identity. It was too late to play games.

  “We’re Amber’s birth parents,” Mariel managed to say. She felt Noah stiffen beside her. She couldn’t look at him.

  To their credit, the Steadmans managed to retain their composure, their expressions equally blank and inscrutable.

  “Come in,” Carl Steadman said at last.

  Mariel noticed that he hadn’t looked at his wife to gauge her reaction to their announcement, and he didn’t now before extending the invitation. This was a stiff, formal couple, she thought distastefully, though she knew, somewhere inside, that the judgment might be unfair. They had been, in all likelihood, traumatized by their daughter’s disappearance. What did she expect? To find them holding hands and smiling?