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And he relented, just a little. “Brooke?”
“Yes?”
“It’s not all your fault, you know. There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
* * *
By morning, the rain had stopped and the sky was clear. Gen had neither called nor come home.
No one—not anyone at Hartmore, not her parents or her siblings or her old school chums—had heard a word from her since she left the terrace the day before.
Rafe called Evan and Princess Adrienne and they told him they would be there by afternoon. Next, he called the police sergeant.
The sergeant said he would put the information Rafe had given him last night into the system. Then he came back out to Hartmore. He said he would need to interview everyone—family members and staff. He asked for the names of everyone who’d come to Geoffrey’s party. And he wanted to have a look around the East Bedroom.
He spoke of what would happen within the next twenty-four hours. Search teams with rescue dogs would be mobilized, a missing-persons flyer put into circulation.
Rafe thanked him, turned him over to Eloise and went out to the stables to saddle his horse. He got the black gelding ready and led him out of the stable.
Geoffrey and Brooke were waiting for him in the cobbled courtyard.
“We want to search with you, Uncle Rafe,” Geoffrey said. “Mum and me.”
Both had dressed for riding. Brooke carried a rucksack. They stood side by side and looked up at him so seriously, with such complete determination. He thought that they’d never looked more alike than they did at that moment.
He said, “The police sergeant will want to speak with both of you.”
Brooke shrugged. “Later. Geoffrey and I want to help. Now. Plus, we’re going mad with the waiting.”
What could it hurt? Brooke was an excellent horsewoman and Geoffrey was competent enough. He asked Brooke, “Do you have your phone?”
“I do.”
“Saddle up, then. I’m going to the castle first to have another look. Last night I didn’t get there until after dark. After the castle, I’ll ride over the north parkland and the chapel area. You two take the lake trail. I rode around it while it was still light out yesterday. Nothing. But today, pay attention to trails leading off the main one. She might have taken a detour at some point. We’ll need to try those. Call me every half hour to check in.”
“Will do,” said Brooke.
Geoffrey grabbed her hand. “Come on, Mum. Let’s hurry.”
* * *
A half hour later, Rafe was at Hartmore Castle, and finding no more sign of Gen than he had the evening before. Brooke called. She and Geoffrey were on the lake trail, almost to the jetty. They’d seen nothing worth reporting.
An hour after that, on their third check-in, Rafe was combing the north parkland. Brooke and Geoffrey had been around the lake once. They’d found no sign of Gen.
“We’re going to circle the lake again,” Brooke said. “We’ll take the branching trails as we come to them.”
Rafe thought they needed to put a limit on how far to wander along each trail.
Brooke agreed. “We’ll follow each trail for twenty minutes, looking for signs of something, anything, that would hint that Genevra might have been down it.” If there was nothing, they’d backtrack to the lake and try the next trail.
When Rafe put his phone away that time, he stopped in the shadow of an oak and considered the hopelessness of this entire exercise. They’d have the trained rescue people and the dogs out by tomorrow, people who knew the way to set up an effective search, who knew what signs to look for.
He and Brooke and Geoffrey were likely only to make the real search more difficult by mucking up the ground with their horses, destroying the scent trail and any possible footprints Gen might have left. They would make it all the tougher for dogs—or trained rescuers—to find where she’d been.
Rafe got out his phone again to tell Brooke to call it off.
But then he couldn’t do it, couldn’t go back to the house and sit around waiting for someone else to do something. He’d done that all night long. He couldn’t bear to give in and do it again.
And he knew that his sister and his nephew couldn’t, either.
They went on with it.
Two hours and fifteen minutes later, as he was about to call the whole thing off all over again, his phone rang. It wasn’t check-in time.
“Brooke?”
“We found a hair elastic,” she said. “Blue and orange, striped.”
“A what?”
“You know, a rubber band thing for a ponytail. Genevra uses them to keep her hair out of the way when she works up a sweat.”
“A hair elastic.” His hopes sank. “A lot of women use those, don’t they?”
